Inside the Nest
by Emily Hockaday
relearn the art of sewing. I thread the needle with my daughter's gold hair and stitch it into the seam I am repairing. Old buttons are reattached with strands of grief, and shirts are born anew. My husband watches my deft fingers. He is amazed to see the seamstress emerge, undamaged by time. We are years from the costume shop where he used to visit me. I embroider the edges of a patch just because I can. There are so many broken scraps thrown to the edges of our lives to be lovingly set before us and gingerly mended. I fondle the textures: rough linen, soft flannel, stretchy denim. My daughter flits around us like a bird, collecting soft things to make a nest. We all climb inside.
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Author's Note
Inside the Nest is a pandemic piece—I live in Queens, New York, and lockdown was a deeply weird, unsettling time. All the playgrounds were closed, sirens ran up and down the streets all of the time. Our reaction as a family with a toddler was to kind of burrow in. Besides wandering the nearby park, we didn't go anywhere but our apartment. I spent some of that time mending broken, worn things as an act of care and maybe defiance to consumerism. I've carried a bit of that with me.
Emily Hockaday (she/her) is the author of In a Body (Harbor Editions 2023), Naming the Ghost (Cornerstone Press 2022), and six chapbooks. She is a De Groot Foundation Writer of Note and a Café Royal Cultural Foundation, NY City Artist Corps, and NYFA Queens Art Fund recipient. Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals in print and online, including Electric Literature and the North American Review. She is the editor of Heartbeat of the Universe (Interstellar Flight Press 2024). Emily writes about ecology, parenthood, the urban environment, and chronic illness.
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